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women whom they had spoken to or heard about or seen doing this or that during the day. All of that was laid out in conversation during the long, hot twilight over pots and pots of the bitter drink they called tea.
    The mounts on which women had ridden home to the tent were tethered outside for the night. Alldera heard the horses snuffling at the ground, sighing and groaning like humans, talking briefly to each other in their peculiar voices. She shivered at their strangeness; there had been no animals at all in the Holdfast.
    Of all the voices in the tent Nenisi’s was the most supple, a rich and rippling contralto which she seemed able to turn reedy or plummy by turns, like a musical instrument. She made the others laugh a lot. They did not keep the small, smelly fire going after sundown, and when Nenisi’s dark skin vanished into the gloom she became a sort of invisible spirit with a playful voice.
    Sheel sat across from Alldera. She had a narrow jaw and her front teeth projected so that she had to hold her lips closed over them. The strong muscles around her mouth gave her face a sculpted, rapacious look.
    She did not speak to Alldera.
    There was a woman called Shayeen, visible by the fire’s embers as a shining being of smooth, red-brown metal, black hair that looked oiled, and a gleam of bright metal at wrist and throat. She spoke rarely, and then mainly of games and contests, wins and losses, in the past and to come. Twice she asked Alldera polite questions without real meaning beyond perhaps the wish to acknowledge her presence.
    The fourth woman of the family sat on Alldera’s other side and nursed the cub. She kept stroking the top of its fuzzy head with her big, square, chap-knuckled hands. Her name was Barvaran, and she was squat and coarse-looking. There was dirt in the creases of her skin, as there had been when she had first leaned over Alldera after capturing her back in the desert. The others reeked of horses and sweaty leather, but Barvaran smelled strongly of herself.
    Alldera wanted to edge away from her. She had known labor fems as ungainly and unlovely as this back in the Holdfast. The drudges of that world, they had been too dull to be anything better and had been saved from extinction only by the strength of their thick backs.
    Though Barvaran seemed to have no nursing cub of her own she did have milk, as indeed they all did. The sharemothers passed the cub around for a suckle at each one’s breast before unrolling their bedding for the night. Milk, they said, came easily to them, and nursing was something Alldera would seldom have to do. She was relieved, for to her it was simply a boring, immobilizing job.
    Outside she heard the sounds of horses and somewhere not far distant the high chatter of the childpack moving closer and farther, closer and farther, and finally stopping.
    She woke with a full bladder and blundered about in the darkness looking for a pot, or failing that the entryway so that she could step outside to relieve herself. She was slowed by her weakness after the cub’s birth.
    One of the women got up, handed off the cub – which she had kept sleeping with her – to someone else, and guided Alldera out. It was, Alldera guessed by the scent and bulk of her, Barvaran, who led her past the edge of the camp to a sandy gully that she called ‘the squats’. Alldera crouched, wincing, in the dry watercourse. The rawness of her vagina made urination an ordeal.
    The sky was beginning to pale. As they made their way back among the closed tents, Barvaran said, ‘You’ll get used to drinking tea after a while and it won’t wake you so early any more. Camp is nice now, isn’t it – quiet and tidy-looking.’
    In this thin light and with her clangorous voice toned down out of mercy for the sleep of others, Barvaran seemed quite different: warmly sympathetic, manner a little shy, an honest soul sunk in a crude and odorous frame.
    Alldera almost walked into the childpack. Heaped